So on Monday, January 19, Hillside Supper Club is celebrating its second anniversary, and Chef Tony Ferrari writes to say he hopes you’ll drop by after 9:30 to celebrate:

Want to shoot over some details about our second anniversary dinner/party. We’re having a special reservation-only dinner earlier in the evening — but its already sold out.

After dinner is over (I’m guessing around 9-930ish) we will open up to the public and welcome everyone to celebrate the rest of the night with complementary sparking wine, five dollar draft beers, and seven dollar glasses of wine.

We again want to thank all of our friends, family, neighbors, guests, bernal heights, and industry folk for supporting us and allowing us to do what we love most: feeding people. We have come a long way and don’t plan on stopping any time soon. We are honored and grateful to be apart of it all.

We look forward to celebrating with everyone!

PS: Our limited poster was screen printed by hand with Jon Fischer, and we will be giving them out during the night.

Your Bernalwood editor is no The Michael Bauer, but I did dine at Hillside Supper Club on Friday night, and I did order the very same venison pot pie described below. So I can indeed confirm: It is extremely delicious:

The mention of a Thanksgiving turducken — you know, the turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken — will get mixed responses. Generally, avid carnivores are all for it; vegetarians are rightfully disgusted. But we’ve recently come across another type of turducken that we think everyone will be on board with: a donut turducken.

There’s no poultry of any kind to be found in this donut creation. The name was bestowed upon this breakfast pastry because it uses the same philosophy of the more traditional turducken: stuffing delicious things into already delicious things. It was made in the test kitchen of CHOW and we can’t stop thinking about it.

Consider how great chocolate frosted donuts are. Then top that with sprinkles and fill it with custard. The donut turducken takes this already truly stellar donut and stuffs it with an entire fried apple fritter. Amazing, we know.

Last week at CHOW, Kim Laidlaw was testing donut recipes […] As she was finishing up, she did something monstrous: She wrapped an apple fritter in a custard-filled donut, then glazed it with chocolate and paved it with sprinkles as subversively menacing as clownface. We spent—oh—10 minutes trying to think of a name monumental enough to describe a thing so weighted with desires of the id. Nothing seemed as right as referencing that other fantasy of conflated wants, the turducken. Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to the turducken of donuts, a cream-filled, double-fried, chocolate-glazed vector of desire.

It’s insane! It’s creative! It looks delicious! Those are all things we associate with Bernal Heights, so it should come as no surprise that the diabolical inventor of the turducken of donuts is Bernal recipe guru and author Kim Laidlaw, who lives on the south side of Folsom near the Alemany Farmer’s Market.

And someday, when you see long lines of skinny-jeaned hipsters queuing in long lines to sample the Turducken of Donuts, you will know that it was born of Bernal Heights.

I’m excited to bring Cry Baby’s Brunch Pop-Up back to Bernal! Our first installment was a great success, with delicious food, lovely people, and a packed house in our host shop, the PizzaHacker. Come join us again for another seasonal brunch featuring local produce & breads. Bring your friends & family, or come on your own..you won’t regret it either way!

Neighbor Andrea Cohen from Andi’s Market at 820 Cortland tells Bernalwood she’s added fresh deli sandwiches to her store’s repertoire — as well as a secure way to receive package deliveries:

When I was first considering taking over the old JC Market, one of the comments I heard over and over from Bernalites was that Cortland Avenue had no traditional sandwich deli—a place when you could get in and out with a fat sandwich, potato or macaroni salad or chips and a drink for $10 (or under). So now we’re doing that, and it’s <finally!> up and running.

We’re hand-slicing the basics: pastrami, roast beef, ham, turkey, salami, chicken breast, tuna salad and putting it on fresh Dutch crunch and sweet French rolls or wheat or sourdough bread. We also have gluten free bread for those who need it. We found an awesome old panini maker in the back of the store, had it refurbished, and can grill sandwiches as well. Green salads are fresh and simple—they can be ordered with or without deli meat.

Right now the deli is staffed at lunch (from 10am to 2pm), but if you want to pick up a sandwich later in the day, you can call it in between ten and two and we’ll have it ready. We also have a handful of “grab and go”. The macaroni and potato salads are great. We’ve priced everything sanely—and we’re using Columbus meat and high quality cheeses.

Also, separately, wanted to mention that we now have a Swapbox automated kiosk at the store — it’s a physical location for packages to be picked up and delivered. The box is at the store year-round, but is extra handy around the holidays for those not home to sign for packages. It’s a great way to avoid having packages stolen, and it’s easy to set up online.

Kugel (קוגל kugl, pronounced IPA: [ˈkʊɡl̩]) is a baked pudding or casserole, similar to a pie, most commonly made from egg noodles (Lokshen kugel) or potato. It is a traditional Ashkenazi Jewish dish.

Kugel is basically a sweet noodle dish, but what the Wikipedia fails to mention is that many contemporary Jews don’t really like kugel all that much… because it’s a sweet noodle dish.

Enter Bernal neighbor Julia Weber from Joy Street. Neighbor Julia is on a mission to redeem kugel for the 21st century. Neighbor Julia’s kugel with apricot nectar (recipe right here) — which comes from a recipe created by Rachel Breuer in the Excelsior — was recently discovered by the foodie scouts from The Food Network magazine, which also gave her contributions to the kugel arts a special shout out in the December 2014 issue:

Kugel seems to be the underdog of Hanukkah staples: Everyone talks about latkes and jelly doughnuts this time of year, but few people seem to give the traditional noodle casserole a second thought, until the Kugel Nosh Down came along. Friends Rebecca Weiner and Julia Weber dreamed up the cook-off two years ago, and they have launched a full-on kugel craze in San Francisco.

Want a taste? Neighbor Julia invites you to the 2014 Kugel Nosh Down this weekend to benefit the religious school at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav. Get your tickets here:

2nd Annual Kugel Nosh Down – Sunday, December 14, 3:00 – 5:00 p.m

Join us for an afternoon of kugel sampling and fun! Competitors will show off their skills with savory and sweet kugel samples. Prizes will be awarded! Help us choose the most delicious kugel and join family and friends while raising money for Beit Sefer Phyllis Mintzer, our fabulous Shabbat and Hebrew school for kids K-8!

There are a lot of highlights on the seafood-heavy menu. Red Hill served one of the best sandwiches I’ve had in recent memory, stuffed with albacore that had been slow-poached in olive oil and studded with capers and lemon juice. The oily tuna, bolstered with garlic aioli, melted into its buttered, toasted Acme roll, its juices dripping onto the plate and coating my fingers with every bite. I couldn’t stop eating it, even as I complained about how full I was. I had similarly strong feelings about the bay shrimp that accompanied the Caesar salad. Heavy on lime juice and tossed with toasted garlic and bread crumbs, the tiny, flavorful shrimp wouldn’t have been out of place at a Vietnamese restaurant.

Roth felt the vegetables at Red Hill could use some more love, but her main gripe had nothing to do with the food:

The most objectionable thing about the restaurant was the service, which was so aggressively friendly that it strayed into intrusive. Waiters inserted themselves into and hijacked conversations more than once, grinding them to a halt. It seemed to be a misplaced use of the friendly, small-town attitude of Bernal Heights, and the spot has already become a gathering point for the close-knit neighborhood. The restaurant was full on both visits, and the servers greeted many of the patrons by name. But all this extroversion can also be off-putting to outsiders, especially when dishes hover around $20 a plate.

Wait… what? This complaint is as sad as it is laughable. It’s like going to New York and whining that the dining scene there is “aggressively competitive,” or visiting Tokyo and grumbling that the service was “aggressively formal.” To whine about such things is to deny the essence of the place; the thing that makes the dining experience genuinely local. Of course, its fine to want something less local — McDonald’s created a very large business by assiduously stripping out all the local from the food, after all — but to complain about a chatty neighborly vibe in Bernal Heights is to miss the point of the exercise entirely.

Sure, to someone from off-hill, many of our local establishments may feel a little bit like stepping into an episode of Portlandia. But that’s precisely why we call Bernal’s main street Cortlandia, after all. It’s funny because it’s true.

Team Red Hill Station should wear this ridiculous criticism as a badge of honor. The food at Red Hill is exceptional, and the atmosphere inside is comfortable and relaxed. The data suggests this formula is working brilliantly for a great many happy, paying customers. If aggressive friendliness is to be the ding against Red Hill Station — and against the very thing that makes Bernal Heights so Bernal — then its safe to say we’re all doing something right.

There’s a new weekend-only brunch pop-up coming to the space at 903 Cortland. The pop-up is called āina, and like the name, the food will be Hawaiian. The restaurant will open up to the public this Saturday, November 22, with plans to serve brunch every weekend, Saturday and Sunday, 9 am-2 pm.

Team āina tells Bernalwood:

We are excited to provide a new brunch option for the Bernal Heights neighborhood at our new pop-up, called ‘āina (903 Cortland Avenue, CA 94110). ‘āina is from the Hawaiian language, and means land/earth. Jordan Keao, the chef, lives smack in Bernal; Jason Alonzo runs the front of the house, and he lives just down the hill.

Our idea is to incorporate all our past experiences and finally work for ourselves, allowing great creativity and responsible food sourcing. Everything we serve will be from the land or transformed from what the land has given to us. The food will have an Asian or Hawaiian influence with a breath of the classic breakfast dishes. We will cook with the seasons, using local ingredients from the bay area, as well as local ingredients from the chef’s home, the Big Island of Hawai’i. Our Facebook page has more information and a sample of our menu.